The Navy’s New Stealth Destroyer is 98 Percent Complete

And it could be finished by March.

Beneath the highly visible shadow of the now commissioned first-in-class stealthy USS Zumwalt destroyer, the Navy has been quietly making rapid progress with its second Zumwalt-class destroyer – the soon-to-be USS Michael Monsoor – slated for delivery as soon as March of this year.

The ship, called DDG 1001, is now 98-percent complete and preparing for builders trails this coming December, Capt. Kevin Smith, DDG 1000 Program Manager, said recently at the Surface Navy Association symposium.

Much like the lead Zumwalt-class ship, the 2nd is envisioned as a stealthy, multi-mission land and blue-water attack platform armed with long-range precision fires, a wide range of offensive and defensive missiles, faster computer processing speed and an electric drive Integrated Propulsion System with 78-megawatts of on-board electrical power.

Using the same technical baseline, ship specs and weapons system as the first Zumwalt, the Monsoor is being engineered with a computer system specifically designed to accommodate software uprades as new technologies emerge.

The ship computer, called Total Ship Computing Environment, integrates many of the ship’s systems such as its radar, weapons and propulsion apparatus. Software upgrades impacting radar, fire control and some weapons areas represent some potential

margins of difference making the ships more advanced. Accordingly, both the first and second Zumwalt will likely have some new systems by the time the Mansoor sets sail.

“We are still always learning and updating the computer programs. We will do functional and performance testing, but it is impossible to test 7-million lines of code,” Smith said.